Between two worlds

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Culture clash is part of life's journey for the children of
most migrant families, writes Sushi Das.

It's not easy in Australia. Allah orders abstinence from alcohol
but there's booze everywhere: at the barbecue, in the student bar.
The Koran demands modest dress, but all around are singlets and
mini-skirts. Islam forbids gambling, but pokies fuel the local
economy.

Exactly how do young Australian Muslims reconcile their faith
with growing up in a permissive Western society?

Culture clash is part of life's journey for the children of most
migrant families, but the lines can be clearly drawn for
second-generation Muslims in Australia and other Western countries.
Torn between trying to respect their parent's cultural norms and
being attracted to freedoms enjoyed by their peers, the resulting
internal turmoil is a constant riot in the head.

Young Melbourne Muslims have been known to run away from home
because they cannot cope with the mental anguish. The acting
principal of a Melbourne state school with many Muslim students
told me that Arabic-speaking counsellors were employed to help with
domestic problems that spilled into school.

And there are layers of complexity that add to the confusion.
Many young Muslims were born in Australia. Their country demands
their loyalty and yet it is involved in a war that, for many,
offends their families' religion and culture. International
politics, Islam and injustice are regularly discussed in the
privacy of their family homes.

The future of many young Muslims lies in the West where they
were born, but how can they totally relate to, warmly embrace, or
thoroughly respect Western ways when they have grown up being
warned, directly or indirectly, against the decadence, the follies
and the wantonness of the West?

For some young Muslims, neither their parents' Islamic faith nor
Western society provide answers. Lost and confused somewhere in
between, their parents lose control of them and they fall into that
dark place where they become susceptible to extreme messages, to a
simplistic ideology that provides certainty, or to a cause that
fills the spiritual void.

As Shakeel Meer, the director of the Leeds Racial Harassment
Project put it, when talking about disaffected British Muslim youth
in Leeds: "They've developed their own very different culture
within Islam, and they are not totally Pakistani or totally
Islamic, and they're not totally British either. These kids face
quite an identity crisis."

The first wave of migrants to Britain or Australia might have
been willing to quietly integrate into the host community and start
new lives. But the second generation (not just in Muslim
communities), stuck between their parents' old world and their own
new world, often have a more profound and troubling search for
identity.

Certainly this was evident in the words of 27-year-old Dilpazier
Aslam, a British Muslim from Yorkshire who was employed by The
Guardian newspaper as a trainee and sacked last week for
failing to relinquish his membership of the radical Islamist
political party Hizb ut-Tahrir.

"Second and third-generation Muslims are without the
don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers," he
wrote. "The don't-rock-the-boat attitude of the elders doesn't mean
the agitation wanes; it means it builds till it can be contained no
more."

The Guardian article, which expressed outrage at the
flattening of Fallujah and Iraqi civilian casualties of the war,
was also printed on this page on July 16, the Saturday after the
first London bombings, before Aslam's radical leanings were
exposed.

In searching for their identity, some Muslims have taken up
Western ways. But strict parents, who feel this means their
children have "gone wild", sometimes instil discipline by removing
them from the Western environment and sending them back to their
families' home country "to reconnect with their roots".

As Baroness Kishwer Falkner, a Pakistani-born Liberal Democrat
member of the British House of Lords pointed out: "It's part of the
segregated mentality. They don't realise that you need to move
beyond the village."

Hasib Hussain, one of the London bombers who died, was reported
to have been sent to Pakistan by his father to have some discipline
instilled in him because he had gone "a bit wild" drinking and
swearing. He returned a "devout Muslim".

In Australia, where young Muslims are also searching for
identity, a separation mentality is fuelled when radical overseas
speakers spout ill-informed rhetoric. It does nothing to develop
harmony.

Last year the Islamic Information and Services Network of
Australasia, based in North Coburg, hosted a lecture by Dr Zakir
Naik, the president of the Islamic Research Foundation in India.
The auditorium at Melbourne University was packed with what I
assume were moderate Muslims. Naik extolled the moral and spiritual
superiority of Islam and lampooned other faiths and the West in
general. His words fostered a spirit of separateness and reinforced
prejudice, but many in the audience laughed and clapped.

Last week the president of the Australian Federation of Islamic
Councils, Ameer Ali, said governments needed to do more to rid the
community of radical elements and stop the many overseas speakers
entering Australia to "teach all sorts of rubbish".

It's not good enough to throw this problem at the feet of
governments. The Muslim community in Australia needs to look at
what it is teaching its young people. Is there a riot in their
heads?